The Things We Do
by theproletariatdontdeservecake
Summary: After a mission goes poorly, Liliana is surprised to find Nissa tending to her wounds.


It wasn't the smoothest mission.

Liliana would have preferred that the temple stayed intact—less for the sanctimonious order whose acolytes called it home and more for the countless shelves of esoteric knowledge—all that ancient power, now a pile of useless ash, lost to her forever.

_That's what happens when you go with the pyromancer's plan._

She sighed. After everything that happened, she was going to walk away from this debacle with only a series of cuts and bruises, pain in her muscles that would only be worse tomorrow, and eyes that even now still hurt from all the smoke.

And she just _knew_ Jace and the Side of Beef were going to want to talk about it later (in yet _another _team meeting, no doubt) so they could analyze and strategize and bore her to death with roles and formations and other such nonsense.

She let out a raspy scoff that hurt more than she thought it would, then scowled, eyes still shut, and cursed under her breath.

Things would have been so much easier if they'd simply let her _kill _the damn abbot like she'd wanted to—it was what they ended up doing _anyway_.

_Idiots._

The sudden dampness of the towel was unexpected and cool against her brow. It was welcome, even with the searing pain as the wounds on her forehead protested.

"Thank you," she croaked out gratefully. She blinked her watery eyes, ignoring the stinging sensation, and was surprised to see Nissa standing over her, the tattoos on her forehead crinkled as she ran her eyes over Liliana and began tending to her wounds.

"I'm not doing it for you," the elf replied pointedly.

"Should I not be thankful, then?" Liliana shot back.

Nissa pretended not to have heard, but Liliana saw the elf's frown deepen into a scowl.

She let her mouth curl into what she knew would be an infuriating smile, then closed her eyes again.

Pushing the elf's buttons was delightfully easy. Nissa didn't have much of a sense of humor (at least not one Liliana appreciated) and was more easily offended than the rest of their little group—which only made needling her all the more satisfying.

It was strange that the elf was helping her. Among all the members of the Gatewatch, Nissa probably liked her the least. In fact, Liliana was certain Nissa didn't actually like her at all.

Not that it bothered Liliana in the slightest, of course.

It was understandable, she supposed. She dealt in death and decay, as far opposite as you could get from the life and growth of Nissa's ridiculous tree-hugging brand of magic. That had always set the tone for their lack of personal rapport. They barely even spoke and, when they did, they _never_ saw eye to eye.

Come to think of it, other than their membership in Club Do-Gooder, they had absolutely nothing in common.

_So, why is the elf being so nice to me?_

As if in reply, the animist spoke. "Life is life. You need to take better care."

_And now she's mothering too?_

Liliana was too weary to ask for an explanation; she was exhausted, she hurt, she felt like throwing up, and, again and most importantly, she _really_ didn't care.

She could bother with it later, she thought, as Nissa's healing magic washed over her. She could already feel the creeping tiredness as her muscles began to relax. Whatever the elf was doing was effective—palliative at worst, and, in any case, far less painful than anything Liliana knew how to do.

She fell asleep plotting how to trick the elf into teaching her the spell.

Living magic pulsed between Nissa's fingers as they hovered over Liliana's stomach and she felt, as much as saw, the body begin to mend itself.

"You're safe." Nissa's voice was quiet, her tone, soothing, even if she couldn't find it in herself to smoothen out the expression on her face. She decided that it would have to do; it was taking everything in her to stay calm in the face of such wanton disregard for life.

She glanced angrily at Liliana and found that she'd fallen asleep. _Good._ She couldn't provoke if she was sleeping.

The necromancer had wormed her way into Nissa's life like a cancer—not immediately, but slowly, indirectly, through her friends—first with Jace, whose devotion to the insufferable woman was beyond Nissa, then with sweet, trusting Chandra, who wanted friends to replace the family she lost, and then finally, inexplicably, with Gideon.

Nissa let out a long breath. If anyone could have been counted on to share her distaste for the necromancer, it would have been Gideon. He was a good man, not just by human standards, and she knew that he'd initially been mistrustful of the newest member of the Gatewatch.

But even the soldier had let his guard down quickly, influenced by how comfortable their other friends were with the sorceress, and by their insistence—in practice as much as in words—that they welcome the death mage as one of their own.

And the rest, as Chandra was fond of saying when she grew tired or lazy to finish her stories, was history.

Nissa sighed. She would never understand humans. Of all the races she'd ever cared for, only humans ever willfully exposed themselves to the members of their species they already knew would hurt them.

To be sure, goblins were more destructive and trolls were more brutish, but even the most curmudgeonly of den-mothers instinctively protected her young and even the most warlike of the Harvesters on her native Zendikar would ostracize trolls who were too erratic or too dangerous to be around the rest of the malevolence.

Humans, on the other hand, seemed not only to accept their unfit and their outliers, but also to embrace even the very worst of their species, welcoming them despite their obvious differences and glaring flaws—to the detriment of both their offspring and their societies.

No other species did that.

It was strange.

It was _unnatural_.

It was…_exactly why I had to leave mother and the Joraga all those years ago._

She frowned at the realization and the homesick pang in her chest that accompanied it.

Then she banished the thoughts from her mind and busied herself again with healing the people in front of her.

Nissa sighed again as she watched the purples and blues of the bruises ebb into greens and yellows. She'd sworn to protect all life but there were an infinite number of planes and an infinite number of threats and she couldn't be everywhere at once.

But she could be here, with her friends—these humans—who, for better or for worse, had taken her in.

"Good thing for you_,_" she said, holding a hand over Liliana's bare midsection. Cuts that intersected the sinister tattoos began to close.

"Rest now," she whispered. "I'll watch over you. I promise."

She turned her head to frown at the sleeping Liliana. They'd taken _her_ in too, for better or for worse.

Nissa shook her head and turned her gaze back to Liliana's newly-healed abdomen and the tiny, scared, but thankfully unharmed soul growing in it.

She rested a hand on it, offering it comfort and feeling its anxiety wane.

"Both you and your mother."


End file.
